God’s Mysterious Kingdom
Epiphany 2 – Narrative Lectionary 2
January 17, 2016
Grace, Mankato, MN
Mark 2.1-34
Stop for a minute and think about what it means to be in love. How would you describe being in love to someone else? You’d probably look around for an everyday situation and say, “Being in love is like…” For example, you might say, “Being in love is like having the flu; you can’t eat or sleep and you ache all over.” Or you might say, “Being in love is like planting and tending a garden.” The reason you do this is because love is mysterious and almost secretive. Love most often comes of its own accord when you least expect and it grabs hold of you in ways you can’t anticipate.
Trying to explain love is like Jesus trying to explain the Kingdom of God. In fact, love and the Kingdom of God have a lot in common. Jesus uses parables to describe the Kingdom, which is what I did with trying to explain love. Like love, the kingdom of God is mysterious and even secretive. We do know that it is God’s promised and intended future for us. But the Kingdom is not just future. It is also present in some way in, with and through Jesus’ ministry that may not always be apparent. However, the irony of parables is that they hide as much as they reveal and confound as much as they explain.
I mentioned two weeks ago that we need to be open to what Mark has to show us about Jesus and not just assume we know him and what he is about. Last week I mentioned my own “epiphany” about Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners: that Jesus doesn’t eat with them in spite of their status, but because of their status. A similar thing happened this week as I received an “aha moment” with today’s text. The parable of the sower did just what it was supposed to do: it shocked me with a new insight about God’s future that’s breaking into today while also provoking new questions what that means. The insight was that, in spite of the “explanation,” the seed can be either God’s work or it can be us or our faith.
The possibility that we are God’s seed raises many questions and stretches our imaginations. For example, why doesn’t God sow us in conditions that are optimal for growth? Shouldn’t God be more careful? Is sowing “us” a crapshoot and God is simply playing the odds? Is God willing to sacrifice some of us for others? The more I thought about these questions, the more I started thinking about God’s action in the world the parable was trying to describe. The situations in our lives that stand against God are not of God’s making, but how God responds to those situations and acts is of God’s making.
Hubert, a farmer in my first congregation, showed me a small book he’d kept for 40 years. In it he had recorded the conditions of every planting from every year. He recorded the time of year he planted, what kind of seed, how deep, the soil conditions, how much rain the crops received and what the yield was. In the end, he couldn’t come up with the ideal conditions for growth. In other words, the yield for each year was still a mystery. I think what the parable of the sower does to us is open us up to seeing God’s mysterious working in the world. God is going to continue to bring about God’s purposes no matter what stands against them. God is present and working even when we can’t see it and, it must be said, seeds do grow in unexpected places.
So, I don’t give you any neat explanations today, only questions and encouragement. It’s not, “Be better soil,” because that’s the one thing we cannot do. Rather I’d want to ask, “Where can you see God working in your life?” and “What’s getting in the way of the harvest?” Mark wants to assure us that Jesus is the real deal, the one who both reveals and brings about the kingdom. This future is a mystery to be probed and not a puzzle to be solved. It’s why we are still talking about this parable 2,000 years later. Even so, know this: kingdom-faith, like love, comes from the outside and grabs hold of you in ways you cannot expect or imagine. I invite you to enter the mystery, but watch out: God is going to grow something unexpected and marvelous in you. Amen.
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